ART LABOUR ARCHIVES

Art Labour Archives is a Berlin-based agency active in the international cultural industry since 1996. From an interdisciplinary platform and with the advantages of an extensive global network, Art Labour Archives provides consultancy to international biennials and festivals, creates situation-specific art events and organizes high-impact theoretical meetings, among other services. Its last production (May 4-6), BE.BOP 2012. BLACK EUROPE BODY POLITICS was presented at Ballahaus Naunynstrasse in collaboration with the Allianz Cultural Foundation.

Art Labour Archives is an exceptional platform that has spiraled around the amalgamation of theory, political activism and aesthetics. In the vision of its founder, Alanna Lockward, disciplines are meant to facilitate each other´s dismantling by means of constantly challenging its own claims to legitimacy. This self-criticism and paradigm inversion places collective knowledge production as a central ambition. In this sense, the optic and praxis of Art Labour Archives is to surpass the expectations of the society of the spectacle and its insatiable appetite for visual and sensorial stimulation. Instead, the dozens of publications, exhibitions, screening programs, workshops and seminars conceptualized and produced by Art Labour Archives in the last seventeen years, have offered liberation and redemption as a viable alternative. In short: our journey is one of experiencing “art” as a labour of love and mutual examination and recognition beyond geographical, discursive and disciplinary thresholds.

Exquisite Immigrant – Indisciplinary Agent (Berlin-Santo Domingo)

Alanna Lockward is a Berlin based Dominican author and independent curator. She is the founding director of Art Labour Archives, an exceptional platform centered on theory, political activism and art. Her interests are Caribbean marronage discursive and mystical legacies in time-based practices, critical race theory, decolonial aesthetics/aesthesis, Black feminism and womanist ethics. Lockward is the author of Apremio: apuntes sobre el pensamiento y la creación contemporánea desde el Caribe (Cendeac, 2006), a collection of essays, the short novel Marassá y la Nada (Santuario 2013) and Un Haití Dominicano. Tatuajes fantasmas y narrativas bilaterales (1994-2014), a compilation of her investigative work on the history and current challenges between both island-nations (Santuario 2014).
She was cultural editor of Listín Diario, research journalist of Rumbo magazine and columnist of the Miami Herald and is currently a columnist of Acento.com.do. Her essays and reviews have been widely published internationally by Afrikadaa, Atlántica, ARTECONTEXTO, Arte X Excelencias, Art Nexus, Caribbean InTransit and Savvy Journal. In 2014 she was the guest columnist of Camera Austria.
At the Museo de Arte Moderno (Santo Domingo) Lockward was appointed Director of International Affairs (1988) and was designated as Selection Jury of the XX Bienal Nacional de Artes Visuales (1996) and as Award Jury in its 26 edition (2011).
She has been a guest lecturer at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, the Decolonial Summer School Middelburg, the University of Warwick, Dutch Art Institute and Goldsmiths University of London and has been a panelist at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal (South Africa) and Duke, Columbia and Princeton Universities in the US. She is academic advisor of Transart Institute and is associated scholar of Young Scholars Network Black Diaspora and Germany. She has conceptualized and curated the groundbreaking trans-disciplinary meeting BE.BOP. BLACK EUROPE BODY POLITICS (2012-2014) @ Ballhaus Naunynstrasse.
Alanna Lockward has been awarded by the Allianz Cultural Foundation, the Danish Arts Council and the Nordic Council of Ministers. Her first documentary project on Black Liberation Theology and the transnational history of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) received the production prize FONPROCINE 2013.